Talk:United States Senate elections, 2008

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	United States Senate elections, 2008 is part of WikiProject U.S. Congress, an attempt to build a comprehensive guide to the United States Congress.
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This is a historical article, not a daily tally sheet.
If someone drops out or loses, do not erase them; rather, refer to them as having ran and lost, dropped out, etc.

[edit] John Warner retirement

Does anyone have a citation for Warner's supposed retirement? Also, it appears we will need a new map at the top right corner of the page if Warner is in fact retiring, as Virginia would be light red. Jsnruf 02:29, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Various unsection comments

Someone better provide some documentation about Liddy Dole considering a run for NC Governor, because I have heard nothing about her being interested in the position; it is more likely she'd give one more shot at a Presidential run.--63.19.158.7 07:26, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

> Isnt it a little early to pencil in Al Franken and Mark Udall as being the democratic nominees for their states, considering as how the primaries haven't been held yet?

I'm not saying they will be the Democratic nominees. I'm putting them in as candidates. That's what you're supposed to do. Put in all the candidates and only clean it up when the parties do have a nominee. I'm putting them back in!

> The person that removed Texas from the Races to Watch section, could you please explain why you don't think John Cornyn is vulnerable? Thanks. --Lst27 (talk) 7 July 2005 21:47 (UTC)

Well, I wasn't the one who removed Texas from the list, but whoever did had one very good reason - despite Cornyn's unpopularity (he is the most unpopular Senator in the country according to the oft-cited SUSA poll), Texas is very Republican and no prominent Democrat has announced their intentions. I think it would be foolish to assume Texas will be competitive in 2008, at least this early.

I would like to see a reliable source saying that Senator Collins is retiring in 2008 before it is posted on the webpage. Byrdin2006 18:46, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Uncited Original Research Essay

And in many places badly written and badly thought out. It is absolutely fine to quote what notable sources say about this election. It is absolutely not fine for some anonymous IP address or registered user to set themselves up as an expert. Stirling Newberry 14:37, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Yes, all this speculation about retirements and possible candidates should either have sources added or be removed. KCinDC 01:35, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm workin', I'm workin'. We'll sift through the speculation soon enough. But keep an eye out and let me know if we need citations. Zz414 01:45, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] General cleanup

This page is terribly informal and speculative. I'm going to try to take some time, Senator by Senator, to see what the current news updates are and to remove a lot of the unverifiable or highly speculative information. Zz414 13:01, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm trying to make each three paragraphs for possibly retiring candidates - one for the current status of the candidate, one for his party's projected candidate, and one for the opposing party's projected candidate. I'm trying to source as much as I can. There's a lot of garbage floating around these articles. Zz414 13:32, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

I keep removing speculation, but unregistered users keep adding it. A lot of these entries should just stick to bare bones if there's not much source data. It's very early, so having a skimpy record on a few races isn't too bad. By summer 2007, when actual information exists, then these entries can be fleshed out. Zz414 16:44, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm going to try and remove a lot of the speculative and tangential items on the pages this week.Revfig 20:55, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Do not sort by 'possible retirements'

The possible retirements heading is silly. Either Biden will resign after accepting the nomination for President or Kerry will. Most likely neither will but it is pretty certain that at most one will resign.

A list of possible retirements might make sense but listing according to the possibility of retirement does not. Might as well have a list of 'possible deaths', which should include them all. --66.31.39.76 06:18, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't think that's quite fair. Retirements are common for senators every six years; deaths are not. Some candidates have been mulling retirement; age is a clear factor; a possible run for president increases the likelihood. Given that, the category is relatively narrow, and it will be whittled down in the near future. It's already been pared down significantly with a few cite-checks. Zz414 17:18, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] External links

Is there some sort of protocal neccesary for featuring a site under "external links"? Everytime I try to add a resource, its removed shortly thereafter, though there is nothing altogether special about the one external link that is allowed to remain. revfig 14:47, 17 November 2006 (EST)

External links must adhere to Wikipedia's guideline on external links. You'll see that "discussion forums" (among other things) are listed under "links normally to be avoided." For what it's worth, I read portions of the discussion board posts linked, and while I found them to be interesting, the link doesn't adhere to WP:EL. If the remaining link does not adhere to this guideline, it should be removed as well (I haven't looked at it). · j e r s y k o talk · 19:57, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for going over that. For matters such as future elections, I can't think of any site that can claim to be an "expert", given that much of the topic is speculation and based on predictions. The WP:EL page also lists "blogs" as a link to normally be avoided, which is what the remaining external link is; however, since the general purpose of that blog (and the discussion board thread which I maintain and tried to link) is to provide updated analysis based upon recent news reports (which are posted and credited), would it not be acceptable to leave these external links, given that there is likely to be no site that can claim to be an expert on this topic? -revfig —Preceding unsigned comment added by [[User:{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]] ([[User talk:{{{1}}}|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/{{{1}}}|contribs]])

I removed the blog and included a couple of mainstream polling and political sites. It's so early in the season that Wiki won't have many decent links anyway. Over the next year or so, we'll be able to get more links. Zz414 20:26, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wayne Allard

Allard announced he's not seeking another term. I have the cite. Valadius 19:24, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

What is it? Carpet9 23:19, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Ah. Never mind. Carpet9 23:30, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Please reference

Please please please cite your additions! Thanks. · j e r s y k o talk · 22:11, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] George Cook

The George Cook linked to in the Pat Roberts section is not the George Cook that the article is referring to; it's an opera singer. 70.254.28.213 03:03, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I disambiguated the link to George Cook so it points to a possible name for an article if it's created. --Bobblehead 09:17, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Threatened Seats

Does anyone know if there are any threated seats that may swing the majority/minority situation.

At this stage, the answer is no. The Democrats are expected to pad their majorities in both houses of Congress, but it's doubtful that it will lead to a veto-proof Congress. At this stage, the only vulnerable seat the Democrats have is in Louisiana. Mary Landrieu's support base is depleted by Hurricane Katrina evacuees. The Republican side has three vulnerable seats. In Colorado, Wayne Allard is retiring and the race is considered a toss up. Norm Coleman's seat in Minnesota and Susan Collins' seat in Maine are considered vulnerable. Steelbeard1 22:57, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

And what about Sununu? He's as good as a goner, trailing by 22 points is BRUTAL.

[edit] Larry Craig

I don't think rumors about Larry Craig being gay should be included in this article, because they are exactly that: rumors. Dozens of public figures have had rumors of being gay around them, and I don't think they have any place on an encyclopedia. --JMurphy 06:18, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Now two Senate races in Wyoming

With the death of Craig Thomas, Wyoming will now have two Senate contests in 2008 with the special election to fill the remaining four years of Thomas' term. How do we accomodate this in the table? Steelbeard1 13:00, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

I noticed that someone rectified that issue on the table. Steelbeard1

There is a news story giving the background for the selection process for interim senator in Wyoming and the history behind the law at [1]. Steelbeard1 16:15, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Kentucky

While many sections of this article need to be cleaned up, the Kentucky section is particularly egregious, especially the first half of it. For starters, Senator McConnell did not endorse or support either nominee in the 2007 Gubernatorial Primary. The rumor campaign that McConnell lent Anne Northup his "political machine" is speculation at best, and has not been corroberated by any news source or supported by any statement from anyone involved in the process. McConnell also immediately endorsed Governor Fletcher for re-election after he won re-nomination. Second, there is no proof that the quixotic "Draft Forgy" effort has any support (or attention) from Governor Fletcher and/or his allies. A quick Google search confirms that all the blog speculation on a possible Forgy primary challenge is based off the DraftForgy Blogspot page, which could be maintained by anybody, including Democratic opponents of the Senate Minority Leader. Finally, the 2007 Governor's race between Fletcher and Beshear has, at best, tangential relation to the 2008 Senate contest. Partial poll results for the Governor's Race in 2007 is immaterial to Senator McConnell's re-election chances, and should not be included.207.138.153.98 16:16, 6 June 2007 (UTC)Rev Fig

[edit] 'Senate Vacancies' section

I decided to shift the 'Senate vacancies' subsection to the top of the 'Races' section to minimize redundant sentences after another one was inserted. Once the interim senator is appointed by Wyoming's governor, the 'Senate vacancies' subsection can be renamed 'Interim senators' with the interim senator's name replacing that of the late Craig Thomas. Steelbeard1 16:49, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

"Interim Senator" is used here like it's an official title - especially the sentence, "Interim Senator Barrasso will serve...". As of today's he a regular Senator, but with a 2 year-term. I would actually just include him in the "Republican incumbent races" section, with the approriate text in the section explaining the special circumstances. Comments? Simon12 21:02, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "Speculation" messagebox

I removed the messagebox at the top of the article, because the lead section (which I just edited) doesn't contain any such thing (I don't think it did before, either). If in fact there is speculation in a specific section, whoever posted the messagebox at the top of the article should feel free to repost in the section that has the problem, rather than at the top of the article. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:08, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sequence of the table in the "Predictions" section?

What exactly is the ordering here? It's not alphabetical by state or by incumbent's last name. For the Republicans, it sort of looks like least vulnerable to most vulnerable, but that's not totally consistent; for the Democrats, it looks like the reverse, which is odd.

Assuming there is in fact some underlying order, would someone please actually state, in the section, before the table appears, exactly what it is? And if it in fact is by vulnerability, may I suggest that both the Republicans and Democrats should be listed with most vulnerable first, since that's the most interesting thing to readers; it's rather boring to start out with a bunch of safe seats listed (again, if that's the order). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:16, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Your supposition on the ordering is correct. My intent when I created the table was to have the most vulnerable seats, Republican or Democratic, grouped toward the middle of the table. This allows a reader to see all of the most vulnerable seats at once even with a fairly small window. The boring stuff gets pushed to the outside. I thus loosely ordered the Republicans from least to most vulnerable and the Democrats from most to least.

It is not possible to precisely order by vulnerability because not all analysts agree. Some method of weighting the analyses is needed. You could assign points to each rating: 0 points for safe, 1 for likely for the incumbent (or the incumbent's party), 2 for leans to the incumbent, and 3 for tossup. I imagine that if a rating ever said a race leaned to the challenger, it would be 4 points. Somewhat arbitrary means are needed to translate specific rankings to this scale, for example choosing a cutoff in the Hotline ratings to represent the boundary between 1 point or 2. I would not want to codify any such rating scheme because it assumes too much about the analysts' rankings that the analysts themselves have not provided (in other words, the weighting scheme would be original research). As long as races with reasonably comparable levels of vulnerability are close to each other, that should be good enough.

--RichardMathews 17:04, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

The Hotline rankings label those races starting at #17 as "The Rest." This suggests to me that they fit into a single category in which they are essentially tied. It is perhaps misleading to include the numbering for these races in the table. Furthermore, they seem well correlated to the seats that others rank as safe. It might be more accurate to go back to simply treating them as "safe" (with a note explaining that this is being done).

The Hotline rankings are also very old (February). It might be best to just remove that column until the rankings get updated. --RichardMathews 17:22, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't see a good way to weigh the Hotline rankings with the rest except as a tie breaker, so that is what I did when I just reordered the table.--RichardMathews 02:27, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't think having the seats listed in alphabetical order is a very good method, I liked it the way it was. But if you are going to keep it in alphabetical order, please include a column or color coding that indicates the party affiliation of the incumbent. 74.240.193.120 14:39, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Agreed Personally the other way looked much more professional or at least as professional as wiki can get Gang14 19:12, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

So what exactly are we all agreed upon? Gang14 06:21, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

While I don't see anything wrong with listing the rankings by various pundits of the vulnerability (and, in the case of Washington Post and National Journal, comparative vulnerability) of each Senate seat, I think that we shouldn't make any further attempt to "order" their vulnerability. The points system listed above sounds reasonable enough, but I still don't see how some of the seats wouldn't be ordered arbitrarily, which wouldn't conform to NPOV. Looking back at the 2006 page history, the table was ordered slightly differently. I'm pasting the last update of the table (it was removed after the election took place) below to compare with what we have now. Is this preferable to the current format? Bridger 06:48, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

(*EDIT* 2006 table removed)

I converted the table to the format from the 2006 elections (and removed the 2006 table from the talk page, since it was rather large). I feel that the older format performed better in certain respects (Intrade rankings don't have to be updated as often, overall rankings can be updated by highlighting and dragging, and there is less extraneous data). Election Projection, Electoral-vote.com, and Rasmussen Reports have not yet started ranking the various races, so they are not yet included in the current table. I removed the rankings from The Fix, The Hotline, and DC Political Report for now, since they don't follow the same spectrum as the other sites listed. I'm not opposed to keeping them in the same section; I'm just not sure what to do with them right now. Hopefully, this works better than a simple alphabetical listing. Bridger (talk) 01:43, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Colors in Prediction Table

Regarding the use of bold face: I originally used three levels. Blank represented "safe." Normal text was "likely." Bold was "leans" or "tossup." A recent change reduced this to two levels. The "safe" rankings are no longer left blank, and the "likely" has shifted to bold. I think this change to two levels reduces readability. I also do not like that the change of "likely" to bold provides no contrast between likely and tossup, which are clearly very different ratings.

Rather than reducing the number of levels, it might be worth considering increasing the number. While I thought that three levels was good enough, we could try: blank for safe (perhaps with an asterisk for no rating given), black for likely incumbent, brown for leans incumbent, orange for tossup, red for leans/likely challenger. I worry, though, that that too many colors would get to be too distracting rather than informative.

--RichardMathews 17:04, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

We could use background colors like this. I am concerned that the colors may be too close together.

Safe R
Likely R
Leans R
Tossup
Leans D
Likely D
Safe D

--RichardMathews 00:06, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

I like the idea of using colors, but you're right, they are too close together. You can't tell the difference between either of the "leans" and "tossup". I suggest possibly making the text white and using bolder colors 42Strangelove 22:42, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Misleading Predictions

Looking at this article I would conclude that the Democrats would be lucky to pick up two (2) seats in the Senate in 2008. However this ignores the 2006 election in which the Democrats picked up 6 of the 15 Republican seats while maintaining 15 of their 16 seats. Based on the continuation of the Iraqi war - with no end in sight - significant casualties every month - significant democratic gains (6 to 10 seats) should be the prediction. The economy has some faultlines forming which could be in play by next November - the economy has been a Republican Strength - which may have helped them preserve some seats in 2006. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.94.222.235 (talk) 18:38, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

I completely agree (though I would count the Democratic caucus as having maintained all 16 of its seats in 2006, even if Lieberman is now an independent). The analysts always give a big boost to incumbents. Some of that is deserved. As 2006 showed, some of it is not deserved. For this article, however, we have to report the facts as the analysts provide them. We can't be doing original research by creating our own predictions.--RichardMathews 21:56, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Impact of News on Predictions

There is always going to be some news that is newer than the predictions. I don't believe we should be constantly updating a list of qualifiers to the predictions to give the latest news. I thus deleted the qualifier regarding the announcement that Mark Warner will run.

On the other hand, the table does show which seats are open. It thus would be misleading to show a prediction that was made before the seat was open. I thus have left the qualifiers that refer to predictions that predate retirement announcements.--RichardMathews 22:09, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Also, when does a news event predate a ranking? Sabato just updated rankings on several races. He did not update New Hampshire. Is it fair to say that his New Hampshire ranking predates the news, or did he make a willful decision to laeve the ranking alone regardless of the news? It is best to just stop making this section list recent news events that some editor thinks could or should affect an analyst's rankings.--RichardMathews 18:33, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Trent Lott retirement

Lott's retirement is different from the others, since he's leaving in the middle of his term, not just failing to run for reelection. The seat will eventually be listed under the new incumbent's name, just as the one for the Wyoming special election is listed as Barrasso. Actually, depending on when exactly the retirement occurs the special election may not even be in November. KCinDC (talk) 17:30, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Adding other predictions

I think it would be good to add Chris Cillizza's Rankings, the national journals rankings and Lindsay politics 101 to this page under the predictions section —Preceding unsigned comment added by Fangas (talk • contribs) 23:03, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Mississippi special election

Because the special election date is in dispute--the governor wants it in November, the state attorney general in March, the section for incumbent Roger Wicker is placed in a special section called "Election date disputed." If the courts decide on a November date, then Wicker's section could be included with the regular races. If the courts decide that the special election must follow Mississippi's election law and be held in March, then it must stay separate. Steelbeard1 (talk) 20:26, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

The Circuit Court Judge called for the election to be held in March. Governor Barbour will appeal. Should we start to prepare a special table above the regular table for the Mississippi special election? Steelbeard1 (talk) 04:01, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

No special table needed as the MS Supreme Court ruled the special election can be held in November. Steelbeard1 (talk) 19:43, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Map incorrect

The map at the top of this page is incorrect. It has Oregon highlighted as a state with two incumbent elections happening in 2008, at least as far as I can tell. As Oregon does not have two Republican senators, and has only one senator up for reelection, this is impossible. I'd change it myself but I'm no good with graphics. Where Anne hath a will, Anne Hathaway. (talk) 18:39, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

The map looks fine to me. Only Wyoming and Mississippi are dark red on the map as both have special elections to fill senate vacancies this year. Steelbeard1 (talk) 19:39, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Redundant tables

I don't think having individual tables for the races is a good idea since there is already one big table at the bottom of the article. Steelbeard1 (talk) 16:19, 18 March 2008 (UTC)